Bound or Unbound

I started to think tonight about what an artist feels bound by/to in creating work, what constraints an artist feels free to break, where an artist draws (intentionally or unintentionally) the line between the two, favoring bound or favoring constrained, and how that sensibility impacts the artist's work.

Artists can be constrained by material, technique, formal composition, conceptual underpinning, presentation context, media form and/or conventions, habitual aesthetics, etc., to varying degrees.

A found image anchors the transformed work, no matter the manipulation. An artist manipulating a found image is bound by the found image.

The loss of identity varies. While the artist feel unconstrained in the extent to which the artist deteriorates /destroys /alters /uses /etc the found image, the image is the starting place and an absolute element, even if the found image is ultimately completely removed after the piece is "finished". The level of constraint felt by the artist presumably ought to relate to the amount of identity the found image loses through the artist's manipulation -- or, say the artist's translation of the identity of the found image into something else. The level of constraint can be looked at in terms of quantity (the number of manipulations) and quality (the transformative impact of any given manipulation). If an artist starts with the found image and does nothing but alter its context (e.g. hang it on a gallery wall or frame it, etc), the artist has transformed it with a great deal of restraint, constraining it almost to itself; yet, the nature of the contextual change may substantially alter the identity of the piece for the viewer (e.g. from scrap to "high" art). One change like whiting out a small area of the found image may do little to alter the identity of an image, but erasing all of it certainly would dramatically alter its identity. Erasing a lot of it but leaving essential characteristics might in effect barely alter the identity of the found image; erasing only an essential characteristic might almost completely alter the identity of a found image.